Jeroen Sangers

The temperature is slowly rising to a level where there are only two places to stay: inside an air-conditioned office or on the beach. This weekend I choose the latter, resulting in a lot of time to dream…

I thought about this site, and how I am only using a fraction of the available disk space and bandwidth.

What a waste! What if I just sold the space and bandwidth I am not using? Should be easy enough, I already us cPanel to manage the site, and I know that an additional script called WebHost Manager is available in which I can create new users and assign hosting packages. I could easily implement this without any additional cost.

What else should I need? A way to receive payments.… Most hosting providers I dealt with use 2CheckOut to receive credit card payments, and I could open a Paypal account as well. Both payment services take a percentage of the sales amount, both come without any set-up costs or monthly charges, so that’s free of risk.

What else? I need to communicate with my clients. Some kind of helpdesk software, which also manages the client’s orders and invoices and which can be linked to the two services above to cash in and preferably to WHM so accounts are generated automatically, after all, I rather spend my time on the beach.

There are some very good and complex packages available, but at this moment I am still dreaming, so I don’t want to spend too much money, and certainly don’t want to pay monthly charges. Google found phpCoin, which looks like it could be a good face towards my clients.

Mmmm, sounds like I could do it. Of course I have to spend some more time on the beach to think about details as the composition of the hosting packages I am going to offer and the name of my little hosting company (I already have some ideasj, and after that I need even more hours to implement all this and make a stunning design for the site. Will this dream ever come true???

A trend I noticed on my sites lately: referrer spam is dying out, trackback spam is the main focus of spammers. This makes sense, since most sites only have one page showing their referrer statistics, if shown at all, while they usually accept trackback pings on every page.

For me it changes little, since the only page showing my statistics is not indexed by the search engines, and my trackback pings are perfectly protected by the combo MT-Blacklist and SpamLookup.

I am a statistics junkie. I check the access statistics for this site at least once a day. Also the statistics FeedBurner offers get checked regularly, so I know what the interest of my feed readers is.

Both statistics tell me where you come from and what you read while you are here. But that’s it!

I miss information on that last little bit of information about my website. What do you find interesting and where do you go after reading my texts? MyBlogLog gives my that information by tracking the external links you click on. Not with a clumsy redirect, but with elegant java-script. My addiction for statistics is fed again.

This small HTML file will on some computers drive Windows into a blue screen:

Try it out if you want by clicking here. [via VoWe]

A little bit more than a year ago, I started dumping links on this site. In a year time I added 650 interesting links, which serve as my knowledge base. It happens more and more that I start looking for information in the linkdump before going to Google. If I know that I have read something before, the chances are quite big I have dumped it there. The linkdump is my little section of the internet, with only the themes I am interested in.

Wie werd wat, waar, wanneer, waarmee en wat hield hij boven zijn hoofd? Wat heeft het getal 1251 hiermee te maken?

My schedule for next week: Oslo — Vianen — Hannover — Dortmund — Frankfurt — Stuttgart.

If you live close to any of these places, you might meet me, a phone call increases your chances. If you live further away, you might not hear/read from me for a while.

Know your rights!

With over seven years of blogging experience and after three years working in the international department of a POS software company, it is only logical to create a POS weblog. The point of sale world has a lot in common with normal PCs, but there are some differences. Old hardware (black and white terminals) goes hand-in-hand with the latest technologies (RFID), which make it a very interesting niche market.

Ten minutes clicking around in cPanel and Movable Type, and POS blog was born! On this site I will publish news about Point Of Sale (POS) hardware and software and everything related to it. Please have a look at it, and let me know what you think about it.

Most computers have two input devices: a mouse and a keyboard. The mouse is mainly used to navigate in the GUI, while the keyboard is used to enter data. Both input devices need some training to get used to, though I still picture my father picking up the mouse from the table and moving it through the air.

Experienced mouse users are ably to move the pointer from one side of the screen to the other side to click on a tiny button within a fraction of a second, which is becoming increasingly difficult as the screen resolutions get bigger. Besides moving and aiming the pointer, they know how to use the three buttons and the scroll wheel at the right moment. Advanced mouse users sometimes use mouse-gesture enabled applications to perform even more functions with the mouse.

Experienced keyboard users are able to reach high key rates using all ten fingers. Besides high speed data entry, they also use the CTRL and ALT keys to navigate through applications.

I rarely meet persons who have reached the highest levels in using both devices. Mouse–wizards usually type with two (or three or four) fingers, while keyboard enthusiast loose time navigating. The problem is that we do not have enough hands. Efficient use of both devices requires three hands: two for the keyboard and on for the mouse. Depending on the type of work done mostly frequently, people become either mouse–addicted or keyboard–bound.

In my work, I receive many interrupts and rarely work more than five minutes in the same application. As a result, my primary input device is the mouse. In the past I have tried to learn to type with ten fingers on the old mechanical typewriter of my mother, but due to my mouse use I have fallen back to a two finger system.

But things are changing. As my work slowly shifts from technical support to marketing and sales, I find myself writing more texts. And the more I write, the more I feel limited by my two–finger technique. I write slow and make many nmistakes. So I decided to use the mouse less and improve my typing skills, preferably using all ten fingers. I am aware that this is going to be very difficult, since old habits are hard to shake off and starting to write with ten fingers will initially decrease my typing speed even more, but I am convinced that I will be more efficient in the long term.

I do not have time to do a special training, but would rather learn it be gradually changing my habits. And of course a gadget freak like me needs some tools to help me. So the first step I took was to install ActiveWords on my computer. ActiveWords is a wonderful application in which you configure words to trigger events. To open the Firefox browser, I simply type firefox and my favourite browser starts. The trick for me is that ActiveWords lets me start applications faster by keyboard than by mouse, even if I use ten fingers to type. Another benefit of ActiveWords is that the Misspellings plug-in corrects my mistypings within any application! It works exactly like the auto correct feature of Microsoft Word, but is works system wide. I have been using ActiveWords for some days now, and even though I sometimes enter the keywords with only two fingers, I am very happy about it.

Another tool which I am planning to use more is Emacs, the amazing extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. Emacs interests me for its huge range of features, which all can be controlled by keyboard. In the past I have met some Emacs-wizards who were able to write and edit very efficiently and I have used it a little bit in my UNIX days. I am aware that Emacs has a steep learning curve but it looks like a long-term winner for me.